Lack of engineering talent + accessibility of the cloud + buzz words got us here. Looking forward to the end of this cycle.
This is somewhat reminiscent of the abuse of higher level languages and the mindset computers are so powerful there's no need to think too hard. However, the consequences are no longer limited to a slow and buggy program but many slow and buggy programs and a large AWS bill too!
It's funny to hear people, typically those with some stock involved, talk about how revolutionary 5G will be. Poor range and interference almost negate the benefits of increased speed. I can't think of any app, etc. that is is currently inhibited due to the lack of 5G. Can anyone name something that 5G actually makes possible (other than giving companies like AT&T an opportunity for a marketing gimmick)?
Not sure pattern matching will age well. It seems to promote anti-OO design, may cause the switch statement to devolve into if/else, and creates another way to do the same thing.
I was looking for an apartment this weekend in NJ and found myself in an unfamiliar building with destination dispatch elevators. What would you personally press to exit?
Who remembers how snappy the experience was on a fresh XP install?
Sure, everything loaded slow off disk, but once you got your basics into RAM it felt so much faster by comparison to how Win10 responds today. Explorer.exe in particular. What a gem that implementation was. I could play folder tetris at lightspeed with that thing, because it actually felt faster than I could ever go. Today, I am sad to report that despite my reflexes not being what they used to, I now wait upon file explorer to do its thing on a regular basis.
To see what I'm talking about, just run something extremely lightweight like mspaint, then right click it in your task bar. Be sure to have a stopwatch handy. It might take a little while for the context menu to appear and you don't want to lose track of your seconds. It's the perfect amount of delay right between complete disengagement (e.g. walking off to get coffee) and proper instantaneous feedback. I sometimes wonder if psychologists working at Microsoft have specifically tuned this delay to be as misanthropic as possible. I used XP not too long ago and I recall a visceral emotional experience due to the realization that we will never have a UI that feels that snappy again branded by Microsoft.
I realize I can probably get my low-latency UI fix with various Linux installs... Anyone have any recommendations? Who has the fastest window manager these days? With .NET Core working on Linux and any code targeting it being largely portable... I could maybe get used to a new normal on Linux for purposes of software development, which is also when I'm looking for a snappy UI. Visual studio on windows being the bloated nightmare it is... Some days I spend a few minutes writing specifications for a new IDE just as a means of catharsis. There is zero excuse for the kinds of delays I regularly see between keypress and UI feedback.
> I realize I can probably get my low-latency UI fix with various Linux installs... Anyone have any recommendations? Who has the fastest window manager these days?
LXDE (the original, not LxQT) is still well-supported on Debian Stable, and that's probably the closest thing to a 'XP-like or better' experience on Linux these days. Xfce is not far behind, though. Or you can experiment with more niche stuff such as WindowMaker, Fvwm95, IceWM and whatnot, but you're more likely to run into unimplemented stuff and these are simple window managers, so utility programs must be installed separately.
Of course, you should be mindful of RAM requirements. A modern Linux install will need at least 1GB to feel really snappy, which is far above the typical XP machine.
Even the nicest Linux desktop has more lag than ~KDE3 days. I think that's a global shift in how rendering is done, it used to be crude and glitchy but extremely cheap cycle wise, now you have compositing ... smooth matrices but maybe (I never wrote code for composited DE) this cause a fixed offset in response ?
The compositing step is done entirely on Vblank and is typically hardware-accelerated (hence no CPU overhead), but this means that updates to the screen only happen at next Vblank. With a single, non-composited framebuffer, an update happens as soon as the updated content is "scanned out" to the display, so you will save half a Vblank interval on average. (You will also incur some tearing but that only matters when showing media content, not in typical use.)
Most of the latency you see in modern Linux desktops comes from the tech stack, not the compositor. E.g. Plasma, and lots of other KDE components, are QML-based. You can see ths if you disable compositing. For example, you can run KDE with Openbox, without compositing, and lots of things are still laggy. Same thing with XFCE, where it's possible to disable xfwm4's compositor.
Not picking on KDE specifically -- I'm mentioning it because I use it on a few machines and it's the one that I'm most familiar with.
Compositing will inevitably give you some lag, but there's cap on how much, depending on the Vblank time. Extra lag is entirely self-inflicted :-).
I usually disable it on my work machine, too. I don't use flat themes anywhere, so I don't really need shadows, and I'm more than happy about the reduced latency.
>To see what I'm talking about, just run something extremely lightweight like mspaint, then right click it in your task bar...
>I'm looking for a snappy UI.
Problems like these I think stems from poor design decisions made at Microsoft as a whole.
Take ARC compared to Garbage Collection as an example. Not sure why Microsoft chose a Garbage Collector design when implementing .NET, but given how Garbage Collection works, there's always risk of it causing UI stutter when it's doing its thing. Apple in comparison chose an ARC design when implementing Swift to avoid potential responsive UI issues... even if ARC is overall less performant.
Then you also have the decisions to support backwards compatibility and you have a mess on your hands.
Frankly, I hate it somedays when I click on my windows calculator app and it opens a blank window and just sits there. I have to kill it and restart it 2-3 more times before it actually opens up. Stuff like this should never happen!
Sorry you're right, I meant tracing garbage collection.
>Same UI issues can happen in reference counting with deeply nested data structures.
Only if done poorly. The difference is this is deterministic and therefore an issue you can control and avoid with ARC (albeit at a cost to overall performance). The point was that ARC doesn't have the potential for a uncontrollable random process kicking in, stopping your app and causing UI stutter as it cleans up memory, whereas tracing GC does.
I'll go on... the 95/XP UI was meticulously crafted. It solved some real usability problems by drawing on metaphors to aid discovery. It was close to a language. I think what happened was eventually the designer types got their hands in there and started making changes here and there to make specific things look good. Now we're here.
> I think what happened was eventually the designer types got their hands in there
No, what happened is Microsoft placed a bet on us moving to a multi-platform future where there are many fewer PCs and more tablets, hybrid devices, whatever, all with the need to use touch, pen as well as keyboard for input. The existing start menu and taskbar would be hideous on mobile devices.
The problem is they were wrong. But I'm not going to blame "designer types". If you ever used Metro UI on a Windows Phone device you'd see that it was a truly remarkable system... that was bent to fit a task it didn't fit.
I feel their main mistake was lack of choice. The second biggest mistake was pushing too many changes at a time.
For choice, they finally relented with windows 8.1 and allowed people to boot to desktop directly rather than the start screen. Windows 10 took off the start screen completely.
Choice matters. I liked the start screen but the horizontal scrolling killed it. Like pouring salt in Tea.
Too many changes.
Facebook's learned this lesson well. They no longer do large overhauls. Small changes at a time and in a few months, it's a whole different interface. Only infrequent users would notice.
That's what they are doing with Windows 10 - many small interface changes. The little changes are mainly minor inconveniences.
One last thing.
When they released windows 8 - hardware support was almost non existent. Touch screen PC from that era really sucked. Now with detachable screens, Win 8 style pc interactions might be cool.
> a multi-platform future where there are many fewer PCs and more tablets, hybrid devices, whatever, ...
> The problem is they were wrong.
They weren't far off either. While PC sales haven't crashed as many feared, the majority of growth in larger form factor computing has been iPads & Chromebook. That plus the fact that a big percentage of desktop software has moved to Javascript/ Electron.
I can't blame MS for trying to retrofit Metro on desktop. They were in a tight spot (apple and google were shining hard) and had to make a move. Market war.
I admit being sad that Metro was wasted though because it really was very nice on phones.
GNOME 3 actually does a far better job of integrating the "desktop" and "tablet/mobile/hybrid" worlds, and that's with a pretty conventional widget toolkit (Adwaita), albeit running on a loosely Win8-like shell (no "applications menu" or taskbar by default, they're replaced by an "overview" screen). So I'm pretty sure that the traditional Win32 UI would've been up to the task with a few tweaks.
That's exactly what happened, and it all started with the damn ribbon BS in Office.
To me, the "advancement" of the human-computer interface came to a screeching halt at that time. People grok menus. Memorizing sequences of Mnemonic accelerators is natural when overlaid on a haptic path created by mouse movement/menu navigation.
Then you take everything and throw out the baby with the bath water by trying to put every past bit of functionality on screen at the same time when what one needs is to be able to set up a work bench quickly, and just do your work, and if necessary save said work bench state to return to later.
I've seen more and "better" advancements in UI design in exactly 1 place, in all the different software suites I use, and that is in IDEs. Ironically, the one place that programmers have to make due day in, day out.
It makes me wonder whether anyone who presides over these programs is actually proficient in the non-computing version of said task. A Typesetter/document composer for instance. Nothing about the modern interface leads me to believe that any actually invested individual is involved, and that the design was pushed by the need for someone at Microsoft to be seen as needed in order to change something.
Then again... Can"t judge 'em for that. We all want to be wanted.
What I hate is the save / options / preference / file menu of office 2016 upwards. It's a nightmare - just too many steps to save a simple file to disk. Even after using it for years, I still need to pay full attention in this menu rather than muscle memory.
Yep. That thing is a fucking abomination. I believe it's called backstage or something and the idiots who petitioned for, designed and approved it should be dishonorably discharged.
I agree. With the the ribbon they broke their own UI guidelines and never got back. Windows 95 was a huge jump in usability but first with the ribbon and then with Windows 8 they destroyed their own progress.
Even after years I prefer menus and toolbars over the ribbon. With them you can scan in one direction whereas with the ribbon you have to up and down, left and right. I find it really difficult to find something there.
I wouldn’t mind that much, because I can just pin some stuff to the taskbar, press a button to type and find other stuff, and use a few apps. All I do is use a few apps. The OS just needs to make the network connect, show an image on the screen, and keep out of my way.
Unfortunately that’s not what Windows does any more. It lags. It does weird stuff. It keeps moving things around.
This isn’t just one installation. I’ve installed W10 a few times over the past few years and the lag, weirdness and cheese-moving continue in whatever installation I try to get along with.
There are plenty of useful things that can be done below the surface that would make Windows better over time. Breaking the interface due to incessant fiddling isn’t adding value: it’s removing it.
And yes, these are the main reasons I’m currently sticking with MacOS everywhere. I just need the OS to work and let me run my stuff in peace.
This is somewhat reminiscent of the abuse of higher level languages and the mindset computers are so powerful there's no need to think too hard. However, the consequences are no longer limited to a slow and buggy program but many slow and buggy programs and a large AWS bill too!